Beijing, 31 May (Xinhua) -- A crying childhood -- the black interest chain that enslaves migrant child labor in the United States
Xinhua News Agency reporters Zhao Hui, Meng Yifei, and Sun Ding
New York, USA, is full of high-rise buildings and bright lights.
In order to show the "barbarians" the development and superiority of "modern civilization", the United States arranged for an old Indian chief to go to this international metropolis for an "in-depth tour". Towards the end of the trip, someone asked the old chief, "What surprised you the most about this trip?" The old chief replied quietly, "Children are working." ”
In 1906, the American poet Edwin Markham wrote about child labor in his article "Children on the Loom", which is still prevalent in the United States.
In recent years, U.S. companies have been exposed to illegal child labor. Unlike more than 100 years ago, most of today's victims are migrant children from poor countries in Latin America and Africa. Some illegal employers and politicians in the United States collude with each other, relax legal restrictions, weaken the implementation of the system, condone human trafficking syndicates, and use children as "trading commodities" and "tools for profit", creating a black interest chain, fully exposing the selfishness and hypocrisy of the United States in dealing with human rights issues.
The United States, which considers itself a "human rights defender" and frequently accuses other countries of human rights violations, is the only country among the 193 member states of the United Nations that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
This is a May 16 photograph of migrant children inside a shelter in the U.S.-Mexico border city of Reynosa, Mexico. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Xin Yuewei
"Human traffickers"
"From the first day I arrived at the factory, I didn't want to go back there. It was terrible, it was very cold, and the trolley pushed out of the cold storage was heavy. The machine is very sharp, and if you are not careful, one hand may be gone. In the documentary "Trafficking to America," produced by PBS, a Guatemalan child who goes by the pseudonym Edgar tells how he was taken by a human trafficking ring to work on a chicken farm in Ohio.
Edgar and five other companions, aged 14 to 17, live in shacks with poor sanitation and no heating, and work intensively for up to 12 hours a day. They also thought about fleeing, but smugglers threatened to work to repay the smuggling costs, or their families in Guatemala would "eat a few bullets." Former U.S. Senator Rob Portman, who was involved in the investigation, said: "As far as I understand, this is by no means an isolated incident, but part of a systemic problem. ”
By "systemic problems," Portman refers to the U.S. government's lack of protection for unaccompanied migrant children, who fall victim to "modern slavery." Under U.S. law, the Department of Homeland Security refers unaccompanied immigrant children who cross the border illegally to the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement, which contacts the immigrant child's guardian in the United States or finds other suitable sponsors to provide housing for the children. During this process, the guardian or sponsor must undergo rigorous background checks, identity verification, and regular return visits.
In recent years, the number of unaccompanied migrant children has soared, but the U.S. government has simplified procedures to stop collecting sponsors' fingerprints and even conducting criminal record checks on sponsors. Traffickers exploit these loopholes by luring migrant children to the United States, then posing as "relatives" to take them out of shelters, pretending to be their identities, and then sending them to businesses or farms through labor dispatch companies, forcing them into intensive labor and claiming most of their income.
The New York Times revealed that as many as 85,000 unaccompanied migrant children have lost contact after being taken away by guardians or sponsors in the past two years. Although the Department of Health and Human Services identified the problem during its routine monthly return visits, little action was taken.
"Whether intentionally or not, the U.S. government has become a multibillion-dollar trafficker in the massive trafficking of children." Tara Rodas, who worked at a shelter under the Department of Health and Human Services, said. After discovering that some of the sponsors of immigrant children were smugglers or members of transnational criminal organizations, she came forward to report them, only to be threatened by Department of Health and Human Services staff.
At a hearing in the House of Representatives in April, Rodas said: "Instead of giving these children the 'American dream' they want, we give them to villains and make them slaves in modern society." It's terrible. ”
"Better management, cheaper, fewer strikes"
From early June to late August 2022, a 13-year-old Guatemalan girl worked all night cleaning a bone chopper at a meat processing plant in Nebraska, USA, working five to six days a week from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. In just over two months, her hands and knees were burned with highly corrosive detergent and covered with blisters.
She was illegally hired by a packaging hygiene service company, one of the largest food safety and sanitation service providers in the United States. The investigation found at least 102 child laborers between the ages of 13 and 17 working at the 13 meatpacking plants it works with, according to information released by the Labor Department in February. The children cleaned meat-processing equipment with hazardous chemicals, and at least three were injured on the job.
The investigation shows that many well-known American companies such as Ford, Walmart, General Motors, and Target Department Store or their supply chain companies have a bad record of illegal child labor. In 2022, two auto parts suppliers in Alabama, USA, were exposed to child labor, and one metal stamping plant employed as many as 50 child laborers, the youngest of which was 12 years old. In May, three McDonald's franchisees were exposed to employ as many as 305 child laborers in 62 restaurants, two of whom were as young as 10.
Research by the Center for Labor Studies at the University of Iowa in the United States points out that child labor has a long history in the United States. As the United States industrialized, employers tended to prefer to recruit child labor because they were "better managed, cheaper, and less on strike."
Today, the problem of child labour remains unresolved. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 835 businesses that illegally employ child labor were investigated in fiscal year 2022 alone, involving more than 3,800 children. Of these, 688 were victims of hazardous work. According to US media reports, many child laborers are migrant children from Central American countries, some of them are building roofs in Tennessee, some cleaning slaughterhouses in Mississippi, and some sawing wood in South Dakota...
Jaime Tamayo, an immigration expert at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, said that the illegal hiring of migrant children using false identities has greatly reduced the cost of labor dispatch companies and employers.
According to incomplete statistics from the US media, since 2017, many illegally hired migrant children have died at work: 14-year-old Luis Díaz drowned while trimming bushes by the river, 15-year-old Juan Ortiz fell to his death from the roof, and 16-year-old Oscar Dominguez was crushed to death by bulldozers at a construction site...
Under the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act, the maximum fine for illegally employing a child worker is $15,000. If a child worker is seriously injured or dies on the job, the fine is capped at less than $69,000. For example, a packaging hygiene services company with annual revenues of more than $450 million was fined only about $1.5 million for illegally employing hundreds of child laborers and no employees were held criminally liable. McDonald's franchisees that illegally employed 305 child laborers were fined only a total of $212,500.
"These fines are the equivalent of a few cents for a large company. This loss is so small that they may not even notice. Reed Mekey, coordinator of the American Child Labor Alliance, said.
"Exploited children are seen as 'they' rather than 'us'"
Child labor has always been a persistent problem in American society. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, with the acceleration of industrialization and urbanization in the United States, the number of child labor increased sharply. In 1938, the United States introduced the Fair Labor Standards Act, which prohibited children under the age of 14 from working in most industries in the United States. Children between the ages of 14 and 16 may work for a limited amount of time in specific industries, while adolescents between the ages of 16 and 17 may work in non-hazardous work of unlimited hours. But the law "opens the door" to farmers, lowering the minimum age for child labor to 12 years and allowing unlimited hours to work, provided parents agree and do not delay schooling.
Ironically, to this day, the United States has raised the minimum age to buy cigarettes and other tobacco products from 18 to 21, while maintaining the minimum legal age for tobacco cultivation at 12. Working on tobacco farms for long periods of time, workers will experience symptoms of nicotine poisoning such as vomiting, fainting, and headache.
Official U.S. data shows that the U.S. employs between 2.5 million and 3 million people in agriculture. The American Child Labor Alliance estimates that there are between 300,000 and 400,000 child laborers in agriculture, a large proportion of whom come from Central American countries such as Mexico, many of whom are not legally identified.
Rebecca Dixon, director of the National Employment Law Program, noted that the Fair Labor Standards Act is clearly racist and deliberately excludes agriculture from the protection of large numbers of people of color who work in agriculture on an equal footing as whites, as well as the age limit for child labor.
In recent years, the coronavirus pandemic has led to an increase in job openings in the United States, and some employers have turned their attention to unaccompanied migrant children, further reinforcing the black interest chain of exploiting child labor. In fiscal year 2022, a total of 130,000 unaccompanied immigrant children entered U.S. shelters, a record high of 2-fold increase from five years ago. Some human rights groups point out that this means a new peak in illegal child labour.
At the same time, over the past two years, some U.S. politicians have been lobbyed by industry associations and multinational corporations to give the green light to hire child labor, and at least 10 states have passed or are discussing bills to ease restrictions on child labor: Iowa extended working hours for minors between the ages of 14 and 17 and allowed 16-year-olds to serve alcohol in restaurants with written permission from their parents or guardians; Arkansas eliminated rules that required employers to verify the age of child labor and parental consent to their work; A bill proposed in Minnesota would allow minors ages 16 and 17 to work in construction...
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich pointed out that employers are not willing to overpay and are happy to hire immigrant children. And those state legislators are willing to facilitate child labor in order to get campaign contributions. "Exploited children are seen as 'their children' not 'our children'. In the eyes of parliamentarians and voters, as long as 'our children' are not supposed to go to school to work as child labor, the moral shame will no longer exist. ”
"The most immediate way to measure whether a society is progressing or regressing is by looking at the way it treats vulnerable groups, including young people." The views of an article on the American World Socialism website echo the keen perspective of the old chief written by Markham more than a century ago. (Participating reporters: Du Baiyu, Wu Hao, Zhu Yubo)
Source: Xinhuanet